Since the rise of World Literature as a major field of inquiry, discussions of literary circulation have often privileged routes that pass through metropolitan centers, emphasizing translation into dominant European languages, global publishing networks, and institutions located in the Global North. Yet literary works have long traveled through alternative circuits that connect regions of the Global South directly, producing histories of exchange that challenge center-periphery models of cultural transmission.

This seminar invites papers that examine literary relationships among Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, SWANA, Oceania, and other locations within the Global South. Such relationships may emerge through translation, political solidarity, migration, anti-colonial movements, publishing networks, educational institutions, shared aesthetic projects, or indirect forms of influence. They may also involve moments in which Northern institutions, languages, or markets facilitate, mediate, redirect, or constrain South-South encounters, raising questions about whether these exchanges can ever be understood as entirely autonomous.

Rather than treating the Global South as a unified category, the seminar seeks to explore its internal heterogeneity, asymmetries of power, and competing visions of solidarity. How do texts travel between Southern contexts? What historical, linguistic, and political conditions make these encounters possible? What role do translators, publishers, periodicals, archives, and digital media play in creating or sustaining South-South literary networks? How might these circulations reshape concepts such as influence, comparison, translation, reception, or worldliness?

We especially welcome papers that interrogate the implications of South-South literary exchange for the study of World Literature itself. If literary circulation is not exclusively organized through Northern centers, what alternative maps of World Literature become visible? Can South-South networks offer different ways of imagining literary value, canon formation, and global comparison? By foregrounding overlooked routes of circulation and exchange, this seminar aims to reconsider how World Literature is conceptualized and to illuminate the multiple worlds through which literature moves.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: South-South translation; comparative studies across the Global South; Cold War and Non-Aligned literary networks; postcolonial and decolonial approaches; migration and diaspora; publishing and periodical cultures; digital literary circulation; transregional modernisms; indigenous and vernacular exchanges; reception studies; archives of literary solidarity; and new theoretical approaches to World Literature.